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On Lawfare Daily, The Lawfare team shared a sampling of all our analysis from 2025.
Also on Lawfare Daily, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Anna Bower, Molly Roberts, Eric Columbus, and Loren Voss to discuss the government’s failure to re-indict New York Attorney General Letitia James, a jury finding Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan guilty of obstructing immigration agents, a legal challenge to the White House ballroom construction, and more.
Laura Field, author of “Furious Minds,” taught her first lecture on the intellectual movement that has emerged around Trumpism, the factions competing to shape its ideology, and the cultural dynamics of the movement.
On Lawfare Daily, Voss sat down with Kori Schake and Carrie Lee to discuss the state of civil-military affairs, standards for assessing the health of the civil-military relationship, and the challenges posed by both unlawful orders and an “unprincipled principal.”
Mark Stout reviewed Jeffrey P. Rogg’s “The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence,” which chronicles the uneasy relationship between U.S. intelligence agencies and civilian policymakers. Stout reflected on what a truly fundamental tension between intelligence-gathering and democratic governance would mean for the realizability of American ideals.
Frank Rosenblatt described the legal contours of free speech for active duty service members and argued that the military’s crackdown on online posts after Charlie Kirk’s assassination has chilled members’ First Amendment-protected expression.
David Del Terzo and James Dunne evaluated how closely fentanyl fits different statutory definitions of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), weighing the drug’s dangerous potency against its non-use as a weapon “designed to cause death.” The authors explained how an executive’s choice to treat fentanyl as a WMD—even without statutory backing—could unlock new law enforcement powers.
In the latest installment of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Jason Warner and CJ Pine explained why rising jihadist terrorism in the Sahel should concern policymakers around the world. Warner and Pine stressed the operational challenges of defeating the cluster of terror groups in the Sahel and weighed the merits of a United Nations-authorized multilateral stabilization mission.
Joe Devanny examined the priorities U.K. lawmakers will likely weigh while drafting the country’s forthcoming cybersecurity strategy. Devanny traced the evolution of U.K. cybersecurity strategy since its formalization in 2009 and urged the drafters of the 2025 strategy to focus on implementing existing initiatives in addition to crafting new ones.
Jordi Calvet-Bademunt and Jacob Mchangama warned that the failure of democratic governments to design speech-protective legal regimes for artificial intelligence (AI) is enabling China to offer its censorship-heavy laws as a template for AI regulation around the world.
And on Scaling Laws, Cass Sunstein joined Alan Rozenshtein to discuss when we should trust algorithms over our own judgment, why AI can eliminate the noise and bias that plague human decision-making but struggles to predict even basic outcomes, the decisions AI should be empowered to make, and Sunstein’s new book “Imperfect Oracle.”
And that was the week that was.
